Hence grew the taste for that ‘life of the streets’ then so popular--everything should be en _évidence_. All the emotions which delicacy would render sacred to the seclusion of home were now to be paraded to the noonday. Fathers were reconciled to rebellious children before the eyes of multitudes; wives received forgiveness from their husbands in the midst of approving crowds; leave-takings the most affecting; partings, for those never to meet again; the last utterings of the death-bed; the faint whispers of expiring affection; the imprecations of undying hate--all, all were exhibited in public, and the gaze of the low, the vulgar, and the debauched associated with the most agonising griefs that ever the heart endured. The scenes, which now are shrouded in all the secrecy of domestic privacy, were then the daily life of Paris; and to this cause alone can I attribute the hardened indifference with which events the most terrible and heart-rending were witnessed. Bred up amidst such examples, I saw little matter for emotion in scenes of harrowing interest. An air of mockery was on everything, and a bastard classicality destroyed every semblance of truth in whatever would have been touching and affecting. The commotion of Paris on that memorable morning was, then, to my thinking, little more than usual If the crowds who pressed their way to the Place de la Revolution were greater--if the cries of vengeance were in louder utterance--if the imprecations were deeper and more terrible--the ready answer that satisfied all curiosity was--it was Robespierre who was on his way to be executed. Little knew I what hung upon that life! and how the fate of millions depended upon the blood that morning was to shed! Too full of myself and my own projects, I disengaged myself from the crowds that pressed eagerly towards the Tuileries, and took my way by less-frequented streets in the direction of the Boulevard Mont Parnasse.